CHICAGO — Illinois will no longer do business with Bank of America until the bank restores credit to the shuttered factory here where workers are continuing their sit-in, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich announced Monday.

Late summer is not optimum devil-hunting time. For one thing, the creature tends to reveal itself more often in winter, when the somewhat suffocating Pine Barrens of South Jersey carry an extra sense of dread. For another, the ticks are murder this time of year.

COME OUT, YOU DEVIL The Pine Barrens, a largely undeveloped area of South Jersey, has produced many stories. Among them is the long-standing tale of the Jersey Devil, and some people are still looking for the creature. “I’m the first one to say, ‘Yeah, I search for the Jersey Devil, ha-ha,’ ” Laura Leuter says. “But why, to this day, do people still report sightings?”

You tell yourself: “This is ridiculous. What a waste of money. ...” And yet, skeptical as you are, you long for the Lovers or the Ten of Cups to appear in your spread, and catch your breath with fright if Death or the Hanged Man pops up.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 - The budget increase Congress just voted for NASA is a clear endorsement of President Bush’s plan to send astronauts back to the moon and later Mars, the head of the space agency said Tuesday.

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a navigation aid.

This pleasant young man from Colorado in a short-sleeved white shirt has been identified by the Dalai Lama of Tibet as the latest of many reincarnations of a Buddhist saint who lived in northern India 400 or 500 years ago.

Observations of giant clouds of galaxies far out in space and time have revealed new evidence that some mysterious force began to push the cosmos apart six billion years ago, astronomers said yesterday.

Rob Behler isn’t saying Max Cleland’s Senate seat was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, but he insists it could have been. Mr. Behler, who helped prepare Georgia’s machines for the 2002 election, says secret computer codes were installed late in the process. Votes "could have been manipulated," he says, and the election thrown to the Republican, Saxby Chambliss.

SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 12 — For nearly three decades Robert Smithson’s "Spiral Jetty" lay underwater in the Great Salt Lake. Since 1999, as drought has lowered the water level, this famous American earth sculpture — a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt rocks — has slowly re-emerged.

NO one knows Vlad the Impaler’s drinking tastes beyond, well, his favorite refreshment. Yet a beer brewer and a soft-drink bottler are two early sponsors of a proposed theme park in Romania to be built around the character of Dracula.

No one knows how many people believe in voodoo. People who monitor religious belief in the New Orleans area, however, put the number of voodoo practitioners here well into the tens of thousands or beyond.

Polls show that about half of Americans believe in paranormal phenomena. "For some reason, a lot of people want it to be so," said Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and the author of "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud."

PASSAIC, N.J., — She is said to have appeared in some pretty strange places in the area — a grotto in upstate New York, a backyard in Marlboro and a smudgy window in Perth Amboy. But many here believe that on a vacant lot where drugs were once freely traded in this North Jersey city, the Virgin Mary is now appearing in, of all things, the form of a tree stump.